Dee Shapiro Redrawn and Redressed by David Richard Gallery

DEE SHAPIRO Redrawn and Redressed

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

ISBN: 978-1-955260-73-2

Front Cover: Installation Dee Shapiro Redrawn and Redressed at David Richard Gallery Title Page: Installation Dee Shapiro Redrawn and Redressed at David Richard Gallery Back Cover: Installation Dee Shapiro Redrawn and Redressed at David Richard Gallery

Dee Shapiro Redrawn and Redressed at David Richard Gallery April 25 - May 27, 2022 Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 211 East 121st Street, New York, NY 10035 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555 DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC. Artwork: © 2017 - 2022 - Dee Shapiro Catalogue: © 2022 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Artwork Image © Dee Shapiro Images © Yao Zu Lu

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

DEE SHAPIRO Redrawn and Redressed

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

Dee Shapiro: Readdressing the Nude

Dee Shapiro has been a working artist for five decades. Like other women artists, she has dealt with personal and professional hurdles in her career: obfuscation by an art scene that marginalized women, especially those who, god forbid, had a family and children; becoming a wife and a mother to two children; living outside of New York City, the center of the art world in the post-war era; and most importantly, coming of age in a time where women were still expected to be wives and mothers rather than professional artists. Long before the rediscovery of important figures such as Hilma af Klint and Carmen Herrera, if one was a middle-class woman and lived outside of a major urban center, she was often considered a bourgeois hobbyist rather than a serious artist. Today it is easy to forget the paths that were paved—with great amounts of determination—by second wave feminist artists. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a rare occasion for a woman artist to have a show in a commercial gallery. Even as recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, it was unusual to see a solo exhibition of a contemporary woman’s work in a gallery, let alone a major museum or an art fair. At present, women artists proliferate the contemporary art world ecosystem: from MFA programs to major art fairs, biennials, and the global satellite galleries, women artists are finally fashionable and covetable. It took thousands of years of material cultural production for this to come to fruition, so let’s celebrate this unprecedented moment. For perhaps the first time in history, the white male artist is not the axis on which the art world is spinning in terms of critical recognition and curatorial consideration.1 This has the concurrent effect that today’s art broaches new subject matter, often the personal experiences of female artists as well as a critical engagement with the history of art, both popular tropes embraced by second-wave feminist artists. Dee Shapiro’s new body of work, on view at David Richard Gallery, is indicative of the present state of feminist art. The artist unflinchingly and unapologetically reveals the record of male dominated art history as one that capitalized on idealized female standards of beauty, often through naked models of seductive visual consumption, ciphers of male desire. (Indeed, these paintings were commissioned or purchased by male collectors as few women had the agency or desire to obtain such possessions.) Shapiro’s new series

tackles two major topics in this regard: the legacy of western European painting as well as the troubled history of the female nude. Just one of these would be enough to make some artists shudder with hesitation; however, Shapiro confronts both without trepidation as she pushes her audience to reconsider how women’s bodies were objectified, commodified, and rendered anonymous by male artists for centuries. Shapiro is not the first feminist to question the objectification of female bodies. In the 1970s Sylvia Sleigh, Joan Semmel, and Betty Tompkins, among others including proto-feminist forerunner Alice Neel, sought to reclaim the female body in unforeseen ways. The first and most obvious departure was the female body as unidealized, warts and all, hence a more realistic representation of female experience. Neel’s self-portrait from 1984 is an illustrious example of this: the artist is seen as a nude octogenarian, a far cry from the supple odalisques that viewers expect from the so-called masters. Sleigh and Semmel likewise showed bodies from new points of view—from their own viewpoint, including a perspective of female desire, and at times with sagging or displaced flesh. Tompkins confronted female and male genitalia in larger-than-life scale, a topic previously considered taboo. Like her colleagues, Shapiro’s unique approach to readdressing the female nude involves representing the body with patterns and even objects to render it less hypersexualized and assigning identity, through the insertion of found imagery, to her subjects. Redrawn and Redressed is Shapiro’s third solo exhibition with David Richard Gallery. Two previous exhibitions showed a range of the artist’s work, from her earlier Fibonaci-based process paintings and pattern obsessed works to her “sexy drawings”, where body parts swirl and float throughout the compositions, appearing in places similarly to botanical specimens. Here the female body is truncated and removed from an integral whole, symbolized by a genital or breast; likewise, sperm are strewn throughout some of the compositions. Shapiro’s current exhibition focuses on one series—her latest—in which the artist deconstructs and then reconstructs masterpieces of art that feature nude female protagonists. But these aren’t just any masterworks; they are a selection of the world’s most iconic and popular paintings, each of which featuring a nude female figure as central to its composition. From Sandro Botticelli to Francisco de Goya and Paul Cézanne, Shapiro’s new

subject matter leaves no pillar of art history untouched as she traverses centuries of art production and patronage. Using a collage-based approach, the artist undermines the objectification of the nude through the insertion of pattern, as derived through her own marks (in paint, pencil, and pen), textiles, paper, objects, and even wool and pubic hair. The exhibition consists of five large works that are hung directly to the gallery walls, five framed works completed with the same technique, and five small studies in which the artist uses an economy of marks as well as found imagery to reconfigure western masterpieces. My Goya 2022 is one of the largest works in the exhibition. Shapiro takes Francisco De Goya’s The Naked Maja 1795 – 1800 as the subject and source for her iteration. As anyone who has seen the two Maja paintings in the Museo del Prado in Madrid can attest to, the canvases are paragons of female seduction and palpable lust. The sitter, originally thought to be the Duchess of Alba, was actually Pepita Tudó, the mistress of Manuel Godoy. Godoy was likely the commissioner of the works as they were originally hung over a door in his palace. For two decades in the early 1800s The Naked Maja was sequestered by the Inquisition and only later entered the museum’s collection.2 Considered a masterpiece of western art, it is a ubiquitous stop on the European grand tour, akin to how most tourists will see the Mona Lisa in The Louvre or the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. The fact that a nude woman is considered an integral element of the western canon, yet women are still not legally allowed to go shirtless or breastfeed in some parts of the US, is a typical paradox in our puritanical culture. An idealized female form orbiting outside of time is acceptable, but a real woman is too messy and uncontrollable for many Americans. Shapiro’s Maja is freed from her male custody and upgraded to full technicolor exuberance through a vivid palette and decorative motifs. As in the other works in this series, Shapiro first draws the basic shapes of the composition. She then randomly pours ink onto the paper (the works are created on heavy white paper as substrate), which helps determine what the artist terms as “a way of breaking through the figure”.3 One can see the ink in the white, blue and red lines that intersect Maja’s body as well as the background. Shapiro proceeds to fill each section with clashing patterns and colors. She uses a deep cobalt to register the turquoise divan that the original sitter is seen lounging upon in Goya’s paintings. The flesh is also rendered through various patterns, some of

which pre-exist as fabric or printed papers, while others are created by the artist’s hand. Small red beads replace Maja’s painted nipples and the artist’s own pubic hair substitutes Goya’s whisp like rendering of her groin.4 Shapiro uses real lace and hand appliqued sequins to replace the ruffled pillowcases and draped fabric on which Maja is propped in the original oil painting. Goya’s Maja confronts the viewer with lascivious eyes and rosy cheeks that suggest post-coital gratification. In Shapiro’s work the eyes of American screen icon Marilyn Monroe look aside rather than confront the figure, suggesting a reticence to be seen as the ultimate object of desire. Given Monroe’s tragic biography, as well as her instant recognizability, Shapiro presents an alternative image of a female, one revered, commodified and ultimately abused by modern society. My Goya’s non-rectilinear shape is also appropriate when one considers the history of traditional painting, which is based on square, rectangular or circular supports. Shapiro’s large works have uneven borders and are hung directly to the gallery wall, challenging what is typically constituted as “high art”. In the history of material culture tapestries and fabrics were attached directly to walls, and considered ornamental, of a lower grade than fine art. In every aspect of the work, Shapiro subverts and challenges the historical lineage of paintings. My Dream is another of the large works in the exhibition and is a restaging of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream 1910. Painted just a few months before his death, Rousseau’s canvas was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in the Spring 1910 and now resides in New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s hallowed collection. Rousseau’s painting is pure fantasy—while he repeatedly painted exotic jungle scenes, the artist never left Paris and learned of flora and fauna through his visit to the city’s Jardin de Plants, which combined a zoo and botanical gardens.5 While Shapiro is faithful to Rousseau’s composition and elements, the nude is much larger in My Dream, as if the artist has zoomed, and her colors are more exuberant, lacking the heavier Surreal palette of the French master. She also employs three-dimensional objects, including painted pistachio shells and leaves, to reconstruct various plants in the scene. As in My Goya, In Shapiro’s My Dream she collages found imagery of the face of the late singer Amy Winehouse and uses braided pieces of black wool to construct her hair. The

insertion of an iconic and admittedly tragic contemporary young woman brings Shapiro’s nude into a clearer focus. The tremendously talented Winehouse was also a mainstay of tabloid fodder, almost a cultural obsession in the early 2000s, whose death was as notorious as her life. Winehouse famously sang “no, no, no” to rehab. Shapiro, with this collaged face, gives a personality to the nude figure rather than leaving it an anonymous vestige of a male artist’s gaze. Winehouse’s determined profile lends Shapiro’s work with a much stronger female presence than Rousseau’s nameless figure. It also reads as an homage to the late British singer songwriter. Shapiro used a similar tactic of inserting iconic contemporary women in other works in this series. For example, Elizabeth Taylor’s face is seen on My Standing Nude, a recreation of Paul Cezanne’s Standing Nude c 1898. The screen icon’s trademark eyes and dark eyebrows are instantly recognizable, a far cry from the morose protagonist in Cézanne’s original. Shapiro in this instance uses patterns in shades of brown and tan to mimic Cézanne’s heavier oil-based palette. Scarlett Johansen’s face is seen in another work, a small study, that features in the exhibition. My Olympia, where only patterns and colors comprise the face of the lounging nude, is indeed the most anonymous in this series. Aside from the larger works with bold colors and clashing patterns, Shapiro also shows a group of more restrained drawings on paper. It is in these modest, pared down works that one can see the seedlings of her larger creations. The artist used pencil to sketch the basic outlines of nude figures, again from well-known artworks. One recognizes scenes from artists including Gustav Klimt, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, or Gustave Courbet. Study 1 is a sketch for My Two Sleeping Women, a larger work of Shapiro’s seen in this exhibition. The sketch version is left mostly unadorned by pattern or color, except for the women’s hair and a vase with flowers in the upper left quadrant. In other studies, figures consist of rudimentary sketches. Shapiro’s inclusion of a collaged shell for a knee or a face feels lighthearted and comical in places. The viewer sees how the artist stays close to the original form and then how she subverts the template through the addition of patterns, color, textile and objects. These elements are reminders of how strictly a western art historical tradition stayed close to the academic and classical and then how feminist artists sought to dismantle such traditions, often through the inclusion of new mediums or in this case, new patterns and imagery.

Shapiro, who has an abiding interest in the processes of weaving and cross-hatching, finds the perfect medium with the fabrics inserted into these works. That weaving and sewing are considered as “women’s work” is central to the artist’s interest in these processes. Why are such craft-based techniques considered as “low” rather than “high” art? Why does domestic art production elicit such disdain in the mainstream art world? The use of textiles in second-wave feminist art that has transitioned into big business in the contemporary art world with artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Louise Bourgeois, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Ringgold garnering high prices with their work. Indeed, the Pattern and Decoration movement was the place where Shapiro felt most accepted and comfortable as by her own account, she “did not fit into the male dominated art world” at the time.6 Shapiro, alongside feminist artists including Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Schapiro, is associated with this movement, which was founded on principles that challenged what the white, male dominated history of painting by using elements that were considered too ornamental for traditional artists. The Pattern and Decoration artists looked to the history of ornamentation and pattern through the textiles, architectural features, wallpaper, embroideries, and more from all world cultures for inspiration. Shapiro’s longstanding association with this movement is seen in the flourishing and clashing patterns that occupy these new works. Redrawn and Redressed, while a logical trajectory for a Pattern and Decoration artist, shows a significant departure from the Shapiro’s previous work. While the series was born from an abstract work that unintentionally resembled a torso, Shapiro hopes that viewers will immediately recognize the painting that she is deconstructing. It is as if the artist has defiantly tackled the history of renowned male artists, asking viewers to reconsider the sitters for these works as a significant part of their greatness. This intersubjectivity between artist and model, as well as artist and viewer, is the key to their success. Like other feminist artists who have examined the representation of the female body, Shapiro asks the viewer to look closer at the work, to see the fine details, and to consider the female nude as an evolving icon Kathy Battista April 2022, Connecticut

1 It is important to note that women artists have not yet achieved an equal share of the art market, with women artists selling for less than their male colleagues and fewer women artists represented in the market. 2

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-naked-maja/65953b93-323e-48fe-98cb-9d4b15852b18

The artist in discussion with the author, April 16th, 2022.

Hair has become a poignant topic for the artist, who lost her hair during the COVID19 shut down as a result of hypothyroidism.

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-naked-maja/65953b93-323e-48fe-98cb-9d4b15852b18 The artist in discussion with the author, April 16th, 2022.

Dee Shapiro Convoluted Torso, 2017 Mixed media on paper 76 x 48”

Historical reference: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Spring, 1820 - 1856 Detail Image: Water Jug

Dee Shapiro Water Jug, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 18 x 12” Framed size -20 x 14”

Historical reference: Lucian Freud, Tilley, 1996 Detail Image: After Freud

Dee Shapiro After Freud, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 18 x 12” Framed size -20 x 14”

Historical reference: Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, 1630–35 Detail Image: Untitled 5

Dee Shapiro Three Graces, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 18 x 12” Framed size -20 x 14”

Historical reference: Lucas Cranach, Adam and Eve, 1472-1553 Detail Image: Only Eve

Dee Shapiro Only Eve, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 18 x 12” Framed size -20 x 14”

Historical reference: Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910 Detail Image: My Dream Found image of late British singer, Amy Winehouse

Dee Shapiro My Dream, 2020 Mixed media on paper 49 x 69”

Detail Image: My Dream

Historical reference: Paul Cezanne, Standing Nude, ca 1898 Detail Image: My Standing Nude Found image of actress Elizabeth Taylor

Dee Shapiro My Standing Nude, 2022 Mixed media on paper 26 x 16” Framed size - 32.5 x 19”

Historical reference: Amedeo Modigliani, Nude Rosso, 1917 Detail Image: My Reclining Nude

Dee Shapiro My Reclining Nude, 2020 Mixed media on paper 24 x 39” Framed size - 30 x 43”

Historical reference: Gustave Courbet, Le Sommeil (The Sleepers),, 1866 Detail Image: My Two Sleeping Women

Dee Shapiro My Two Sleeping Women, 2021 Mixed media on paper 45 x 83”

Historical reference: Leonardo da Vinci, Leda and the Swan, 1503-1510 Detail Image: My Leda and her Swain

Dee Shapiro My Leda and her Swain, 2019 Mixed media on paper 66 x 40”

Historical reference: Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisqu, 1814 Detail Image: Looking at You

Dee Shapiro Looking at You, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 12 x 18” Framed size - 14 x 20”

Historical reference: Titian, Venus and the Lute Player, 1560 Detail Image: Study Found image of Scarlett Johansson

Dee Shapiro Study, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 12 x 18” Framed size - 14 x 20”

Historical reference: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Bathers, 1918–19 Detail Image: After the Swim

Dee Shapiro After the Swim, 2021 Mixed media on paper 28 x 37” Framed size - 30 x 40.5”

Historical reference: Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, The Bather, 1808 Detail Image: My Bather

Dee Shapiro My Bather, 2021 Ink, paint, mixed media on paper 49 x 38” Framed size - 52.24 41.5”

Historical reference: Diego Velazquez, Venus at the Mirror, 1649-51 Detail Image: Looking Ahead Found image of Olympia Dukakis

Dee Shapiro Looking Ahead, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 12 x 18” Framed size - 14 x 20”

Historical reference: Gustave Courbet, Sleep, 1819-1877 Detail Image: Sleeping Women

Dee Shapiro Sleeping Women, 2022 Pencil and mixed media on paper 12 x 18” Framed size - 14 x 20”

Historical reference: Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907 Detail Image: My Danea

Dee Shapiro My Danea, 2021 Mixed media on paper 32 x 34” Framed size - 36.5 x 37.75”

Historical reference: Francesco Goya, Naked Maja, 1797–1800 Detail Image: My Naked Maja Found Image of Marilyn Monroe

Dee Shapiro My Naked Maja, 2019 Mixed media 49 x 80”

Historical reference: Henri Matisse, Odalisque with Red Pants, 1925 Detail Image: Odalisque

Dee Shapiro Odalisque, 2019 Mixed media on paper 43 x 49” Framed size - 47 x 53” x 2.5”

Historical reference: Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 Detail Image: Olympia

Dee Shapiro Olympia, 2018-19 Mixed media on paper 42 x 72” Framed size - 46.25” x 76.5” x 2.5”

Historical reference: Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, ca 1480 Detail Image: Venus, Reborn

Dee Shapiro Venus, Reborn, 2019 Mixed media on paper 62 x 39” Framed size - 65.25 x 44.25” x 2.5”

Dee Shapiro The Artist’s Statement: As in a dream of alternative realities, absurd connections, or on a trip passing familiar landscapes in unfamiliar settings, new conscious and unconscious associations are brought to a two-dimensional surface in my work. In the recent pieces, geometry (seen even in the structure of organic forms) directs composition: arbitrary drops of color undermine control and create shapes that succumb to the overwork of drawings, rendering obsessive intricacies and paint applications to build the forms. Collaged materials add extraneous influences in a subtle blend. In the beginning was pattern. First, the Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, a piece which landed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Next, inclusion in the Pattern and Decoration (P & D) exhibition at PS1, followed by a series of work that included architectural elements “off the grid”. With all the work, always color and a nod to the Albers’ studies. A redirection to small horizontal paintings of the geometry in cities and landscapes ensued for a number of years. Missing the early fascination and engagement with pattern led to more recent work exploring evocative biological and organic forms, the evolution of which is the more recent work as well as borrowing from sources that include other artist’s work in a collaborative effort. In this new body of work, I am unflinchingly forging ahead to newly wrought terrain. Biography: Dee Shapiro’s artworks were included in the recent exhibition, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (October 27, 2019 through May 3, 2020) and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (June 26 – November 28, 2021). Shapiro’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of many museums, foundations and private collections, including the following: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, Citibank Collection, NYC, Dartmouth Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC, Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY, Hoffman-LaRoche Collection, Zurich, Switzerland, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, New York University Collection, NYC, Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK, Owens-Corning Corp., Corning, NY, Pepsico Corporation, NY, Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS, United States Department of State, Washington, DC, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AK and William Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, Mount Kisco, NY, among numerous others.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY